Romney: The End

Republicans have been castigating the New York Times‘ Nate Silver for his confident predictions of an Obama victory — his model last night gave the president a 92.2 percent chance of re-election — but Intrade and the RealClearPolitics polling averages have been telling the same story. The Intrade spread is now 72-29 for Obama. All three sets of predictions are primarily based on polls, of course, and it’s possible that the polls could be systematically biased against Mitt Romney. Why that would be is a little hard to guess: if anything, day-of-election registration in states like Wisconsin and the greater proportion of minorities who do not have landline telephones would suggest that the pollsters may be missing or screening out more Democrats. But there’s no doubting Republican enthusiasm at this point — it equals or exceeds the enthusiasm of 2010, though far fewer people overall vote in congressional midterm elections. And Democrats do seem skittish; a bit of depression on the part of their base and a bit of polling error in Romney’s favor could deliver an upset.

But probably not. It’s not just the polling snapshot that makes me think Obama has this in the bag — probably, as Noah Millman suggests, on track to win 294 electoral votes — but the apparent last-minute uptick in Obama’s numbers. He’s up less than a percentage point in the RCP average, but look at the chart above, especially the zoomed-in version here. Or look at the favorability differential on RCP’s homepage, which in the past week had Romney up by 3 points or more and now has him up by just over half a point. The late-breaking change is in O’s direction. A glance at the Senate polls also suggests that this is turning out to be a Democratic year. The day isn’t over yet, and polling chaos and tiny margins may prolong both candidates’ agonies for hours, if not days — let’s hope not weeks. But if professional polling and the judgement of bettors and Nate Silver alike is worth anything, the game is over for Romney.

The only poll that counts is being held as I write. Pollsters don’t know what they are talking about. It’s all a guess. 2008 was an aberration as was 2010. There is no basis for any pollster to be calling anything this time around. Nate Silver is an idiot for saying anything under the conditions we find ourselves in. He’ll pat himself on the back, but it will sheer dumb luck for him if Obama does win.

personally, I think Zer0 is going to win. Not because he is great, but because the electorate is stupid. Zer0 is running scared, however, and I hope I’m wrong because we can’t afford another 4 years of Zer0, and we at least have some chance with Mittens. We have absolutely no chance to dodge any bullets with Zer0.

Well it was not by sheer luck that Silver (and several other election modellers) nailed the presidental election margins, correctly calling every state, right down to the Florida nailbiter (I’m writing Thursday morning when Obama has about a 50,000 margin there).

If anything, Silver and Cohen underestimated Democratic senate candidates chances in some small states, like Montana and North Dakota where the seats are unexpectedly staying blue.